This is a fairly conventional romantic melodrama that gains credit for the setting more than anything else. This movie by Richie Adams from a best-selling novel takes place in 1916 in a remote Hebridean island village in Scotland.
Kirsty (Hermione Corfield) is a young girl with a desire to see the world, hard to imagine in her primitive village but as a girl she watched the ships heading for the US. She falls in love with a local lad Murdo (Will Fletcher), who has a sensitive literary bent but just as they confirm their love he and a number of local lads are called up to fight in France.
The village heads hold a “road dance” or dance in the open air to distract them before they leave and on that night Kirsty is assaulted. Murdo leaves without knowing and Kirsty is left to deal with this and other issues such as casualties that occur in the war and the baby she is now carrying as a result of the attack.
All this in a small village where secrets are hard to keep.
There are lots of tears and trials and a few plot twists in the last twenty minutes that make the film a bit of a refined potboiler. The wild local landscape filmed by Petra Korner compensates for the slightly clichéd story.
Acting by the leads, Morven Christie as Kirsty’s mother and Mark Gatiss as the doctor is good and as you’d expect in a British film there are plenty of great character actors in minor parts. It’s a bit of a Sunday afternoon movie but it is competently made and a solid addition to the genre.
3 stars
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